Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 10:54 UTC (Wed) by ortalo (guest, #4654)
Parent article: Trademarks and their limits

What may be useful here is a regular full integrity report of installed software, à la tripwire. You know the kind of thing security guys do to try to spot trojan horses, etc. It just needs (a lot) of polishing to present such information to end users; but it would teach them more efficiently to stop clicking on "yes" all the time than replying to their email complaints.
Open source systems also have a definitive advantage here in order to spot unsigned program binaries.

Thanks for giving such an opportunity to advertise security as a feature more than a nuisance for the end user...

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 6, 2013 13:17 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link] (4 responses)

On windows tools like this have existed for a long time. SpyBot, AdAware, etc, etc.. They alert the user who runs them to toolbars, search plugins and other suspcisious-if-not-outright-harmful things. It's useful for cleaning up systems but as a preventative measure... you can't fix stupid.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 12:48 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link] (3 responses)

It's not wise to think that all victims are stupid.

Some are just different: children, elders or simply vulnerable due to external reasons. Theey deserve better protection and certainly a different set of information than us hackers.

But nethertheless, I intend to benefit too from an occasional automated security survey because I am sure I can find an attacker smarter than me. Don't you?

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 7, 2013 12:56 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]

> But nethertheless, I intend to benefit too from an occasional automated security survey because I am sure I can find an attacker smarter than me.
For the people who proactively install, run and heed the reports from such tools there is no problem. It's the people who won't install it, won't run it or won't read the reports that you can't do anything about. For them prevention is out the window, recovery afterwards is all you can strive for.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 16:44 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

It's not wise to think that all victims are stupid.
Some are just different: children, elders or simply vulnerable due to external reasons.

Those are all just kinds of stupid.

A better point to make would be 1) you can fix a problem caused by stupidity; or 2) a person doesn't deserve to be a victim because he is stupid.

Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 8, 2013 16:45 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

It's not wise to think that all victims are stupid.

Everyone's stupid some of the time. More usefully: "It's not wise to think that all victims were being stupid."